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Villager and Me

Recently I saw an ad in a 1969 issue of The New Yorker that brought back the memory of a time, just at the end of my childhood, when I wanted nothing more than to be covered with flowers. The ad featured a demure cotton shift dress made by the famous proto-preppie label Villager, which, at its peak in the nineteen-sixties, along with its sister brand Ladybug, nearly drowned the suburban girls of America in an ocean of floral print. While elsewhere revolution was already percolating on all fronts political, sexual, and musical, much of suburbia, as described so well by the two Johns—Cheever and Updike—was still rapt in a mood of romantic complacency that might be compared to that in upper-class England throughout the beautiful spring of 1914.

In the air was a sense of arrival, the triumphant serenity of a society whose values and canons, based on station wagons, arcadian green lawns, fathers with briefcases, and mothers in pearls, had become, by some divine dispensation, immortal. This mood of self-celebration appeared in the pastoral women’s fashions of the period: demure blouses, cunningly tucked shirtdresses, A-line skirts, blazers—and at the height of the craze, bras, underpants, sunhats and tote bags—all strewn with Liberty-print blossoms in the maidenly tints of Edwardian botanical drawings. Up and down the East Coast, in that American provincial period before the invasion of international brands, before “Love Story” had graven the word “preppie” into the national consciousness, boarding-school girls and country-club wives swathed themselves in Ladybug and Villager. Until, of course, the zeitgeist swept them off to become hippies.

I myself, at age eleven, passionately desired a complete wardrobe of floral cotton—a wish not devoid of many ironies. I was actually an unwitting part of the social revolution: a skinny little Philadelphia girl who was one of the first black students to attend a famous girls’ private school in Bryn Mawr, a bastion of high society where, in the past, the only black faces had been in the kitchen. I’ve written a lot about my personal adventure at that school, where I learned with such thoroughness how to be an outsider. But there was always an inchoate flavor to the experience that I could never quite recapture. I finally found it in that yellowing decades-old fashion sketch, which brought back to me in full what it is like to be very young and to yearn with all your soul to be someone you can’t be.

I was infected with Villager fever during my first month at the new school. Regulations kept our preteen bodies covered in chaste blue uniforms, but one civilian day, before a fall long weekend, I walked in to find a floral explosion in the halls as my classmates milled around admiring each other in a kaleidoscope of Villager and Ladybug prints. How was I, already defined as an outsider, dressed that day? Perhaps in a plain cotton blouse and a corduroy skirt, the kind of thing that one wore at my former school, a Quaker institution where nobody cared much about clothes. But all that was changed in an instant, when I suddenly came up against a wall of glittering new symbols and values, summed up in all those little blossoms. Until then, my ambition in life had been, vaguely, a career as a world-famous archaeologist or a prima ballerina; but suddenly, with a terrible pang that was the real beginning of adolescence, I wanted something far different: to be one of them—the glamorous school crowd that had no desire for me. There was nothing I could do about the color of my skin and the texture of my hair, but some desperate instinct whispered to me that the right outfit just might take me a magical step closer to being a white girl with a gift for field hockey and a Main Line address.

My mother maintained that Villager and Ladybug were an overpriced fad, and for a long time refused to buy me even one blouse. And oddly enough, so private and fragile was my fantasy that I hardly even fought her decision. Thus began my period of floral ambition, when those two quaint pastoral names—I quickly discovered that Ladybug was a sort of Villager cadet branch—seemed to open a portal into a forbidden paradise, perfumed with Marie Antoinette rusticism. Their ads in newspapers and magazines made up a campaign which even in that golden age of advertising was a small masterpiece. Generally a precise black-and-white pen-and-ink drawing would show an old fashioned wire dress form displaying an enchantingly simple outfit. Below would be a sort of prose poem by an anonymous Madison Avenue bard, evoking the patrician yet whimsical style of a heroine who was a spritely transition between sporty debutante and revolutionary chick. The copy had a tongue-in-cheek literary vibe that hinted that the ideal Villager girl was a Wellesley English major with a dash of Brett Ashley.

“Fall of Flowers” is the title of one shirtdress ad, from the summer, 1965 collection:

Raining softly downwards like the quality of mercy. Small flowers with long stems and pointy leaves. Villager’s very soft very light cotton twill crosses them with faint shadows. The dress itself, pleated down the front, gives the impression of gentle motion, like grass in the wind.

There are dark days ahead. Days when the sun never shines and the gutters fill up with sooty slush and the wind waits at every corner. Days when a girl needs something gallant to wear, to keep her chin up in. … Something swagger. something like a spot of warm sunshine on a bleak day. The norfolk suit (in which it’s impossible not to swagger), banded, belted, and buttoned, in diagonally twilled Shetland wool. Sunshiney in Forget-me-not, Shamrock, Honeydew, Tangerine, Daffodil, Azalea .

“Daisies Do Tell,” 1966:

Even the French, with their well-known aplomb in matters of amour, are occasionally reduced to asking daisies. In this gentle print, with the delicacy of 19th century china painting, they receive a choice of answers. Ladybugs flit amongst the petals. Fine smooth cotton, rather wistfully shaped. The bodice … a touch of demure rusticity … is quilted, producing a rounded, all-girl outline. The effect has a tender innocence, inspirational of the protective instinct….

“Romance,” 1967:

The lace valentine syndrome, only, being Villager, with a minimum of fuss and feathers. Modest, demure, shaped in a long quiet line and bibbed with small rows of lace. Rather heartbreaking, in a virginal way.

In those distant days I never asked myself how Villager originated, assuming the clothes were a Wasp institution like the Merion Cricket Club or the Union League Father-Daughter Dance. If queried I might have guessed their creator to be someone like the headmistress of my school, a tall redoubtable white-haired Daughter of the American Revolution, who once, with a faint smile, confided to me that “a certain kind of mixing”—i.e. socializing with different races—was “not very easy.” But years later, when the memory of my obsession surfaced, a few Google clicks into the world of vintage fashion sufficed to reveal the surprising and ironic truth: that the brand that for me had been the symbol of the ultimate group of insiders was actually the brainchild of a man who might be described as a quintessential outsider.

Max Raab, creator of Villager, was a brilliant mercurial Jewish Philadelphian, son of a garment manufacturer whose ambition was to make the cheapest blouse in town. A lifetime maverick with a passion for jazz and movies, Raab flunked out of high school, fought in the Korean war, pumped gas, delivered mail, and sold televisions and Fuller brushes before coming up with the idea that made his—first—fortune. I like to imagine that he built the Villager and Ladybug concept on his wistful outsider’s view of the style Philadelphia débutantes were after when they borrowed their boyfriends’ Oxford cloth shirts. By the time I was mooning over the ads, there were over a hundred Villager shops with rustic wooden floors nationwide, and his line of upscale feminine sportswear had earned a hundred and forty million dollars. “I know women better than they know themselves ” Raab said in a New York Times interview. “The Waspy girls all want that country look, and the Jewish girls want to look like the Wasps. I knew I had a winner.”

Raab didn’t just make sportswear, however. Throughout a long, sublimely quirky career, he also produced movies—films as outside the box as his own restless imagination. I was stunned to find out that the man who made a goodly part of American girlhood dream of flowery upper-class conformity was also the man who brought us one of the ultimate bad-boy movies: “A Clockwork Orange.” When I read that, I just sat for a minute imagining Shetland cardigans and A-line skirts mingling in his brain with Malcolm McDowell and his droogs. For decades, Raab seems to have been able to dance back and forth successfully between commerce and art: when styles changed in the nineteen-seventies, he unloaded Villager and made movies with friends and collaborators like Agnès Varda and Robert Downey, Sr.; when he needed money in the nineteen-eighties, he made a second fortune by founding yet another preppie company: J. G. Hook. When he died of Parkinsons, in 2008, he was at work with Downey, Sr., on a film about Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Described by his friends as an exuberant visionary with a warm, dauntless heart and a big laugh, he seems to have been that rare creature, a Renaissance man with a talent for living in the real world. Reading accounts of his career, I found myself profoundly moved—even somehow liberated—to think that the fashion labels that, for me as a schoolgirl, had symbolized privilege and exclusion had, in fact, been created by someone—a genuine creative spirit—who soared above stereotypes and social boundaries.

In the end, the only piece of Villager clothing I ever possessed was a floppy sun hat I found one day after school at the Bryn Mawr train station. A train had just left and, except for me, the station was deserted: the hat—white cotton lawn with an enchanting print of wild strawberries—lay forgotten on the windowsill of the ladies’ room like a piece of Arcadia. Without a qualm I snatched it up and stuffed it in my bookbag. Back home, I preened in front of the bedroom mirror, marvelling at the softness of my stolen prize, the numinous power it had in being so completely an object I had wanted for so long. At the same time, however, I had to recognize the unpalatable truth that it just wouldn’t do: not simply because I’d had to swipe it, or because it looked ridiculous—as it did—framing my frizzy hair and intense face, but because somewhere along the line I had lost interest in being a girl who would wear that hat. Over the period that I had filled with my Waspy fantasies, I had also been making my way in that inhospitable school, establishing a reputation as a poet, and even latching onto a few friends, arty individualists who wouldn’t be caught dead in country-club pastels.

The seventies were opening with wild colors and possibilities that made Liberty prints seem meek and spiritless. My friends and I wanted to dress like French sailors, or Moroccan princesses, or groupies, or frontier madams. We wanted to push the limits: doubtless the same emotion Max Raab experienced as he battled to convince the Hollywood establishment to film “A Clockwork Orange.” By the time he unloaded his clothing labels and took off for California, the brief suburban moment that Villager and Ladybug had celebrated was over; Peter Pan collars were headed into history, as even Wasps got groovy.

I can’t exactly remember what happened to my floppy strawberry hat. As a present-day parent, I would like to be able to say that I virtuously took it back to the Bryn Mawr station lost and found, but I am certain that this did not happen. I am also certain that after that first gloating hour I never put it on again. The rest of its history, along with my passion for Villager, lies hidden by the peculiarly thick haze that enshrouds fads which teen-agers have deified, then dumped. It probably ended its days in the back of my closet, in a heap of a lot of other stuff I never really used or needed.

Andrea Lee is a writer who lives in Turin, Italy, and Nosy Be, Madagascar.

Andrea Lee is a writer who lives in Turin, Italy, and Nosy Be, Madagascar.